UncleBear Media

As I will soon by running not one, but two campaigns using Cubicle 7′s Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG, I figured it was a good time to go back over my previous cursory glance at the game and fill in some blanks as to what I like most about it.

Character Creation is Stupid-Simple
Nominally, this game is aimed at new roleplayers and kids. That means it has to be simpler. In addition to a variety of pre-generated characters (The Doctor, most companions from the new series, etc.) there are templates (student, musician, UNIT soldier, Torchwood operative, etc). The templates are on character sheets, so all you need to do is write in a name and some background info and you’re ready to go.

But even if you choose to start from scratch, it’s easy. Point-based character creation is one-for-one; if you buy an Attribute at a rating of 3, is costs 3. Buy it at 5, it costs 5. No wacky math. The point pools are small: 24 for Attributes and Traits, 18 for skills. This means building a character is fast, and the math remains easy. The skill list is small, each skill covering broad strokes. The Traits (equating to Feats, Edges, those types of things found in most modern game design) are probably the most complicated thing for new players, and even those lists are small, well-organized, and kind of obvious to pick from once you have a character concept in mind.

It’s Not Dumbed Down
Just because character creation is easy doesn’t mean it’s not flexible. Savvy players will tinker with Traits to maximize their character, and find ways to use the broad definitions of skills. It’s also Doctor Who; you can create a character from any time in history, anywhere in the universe. The rules cover how to create alien player characters, robots, you name it. If you can think of it, you can build it. There’s a lot of creative wiggle room for experienced roleplayers here.

The System is Elegant
Roll 2d6, add the appropriate Attribute and Skill, beat a target number. Attributes/Skill combinations aren’t permanently fused, so you can mix and match whatever seems to suit the situation. And those numbers are straight up, no factored bonuses. If your attribute is a 3, add 3. If it’s a 5, add 5. The more you beat the target number by, the better you do; the more you miss it by, the harder you fail. Novices and kids will keep it simple. Experienced roleplayers will seek to justify Attribute/Skill combinations and work out narrative explanations for the degree of success or failure.

Initiative Suits the Setting
You don’t roll initiative. it’s not based on numbers at all. It’s based on what you do. Talkers go first, then Runners, then Doers (any action other than fighting), then Fighters. Basically, since Doctor Who is pretty non-violent and preaches reason over killing and maiming, it’s likely the player characters won’t be combat types but the villains will. This gives everyone amply time to talk their way out of it, run, or do something tricky and pseudo-scientific before the bad guys get to shoot. In each of those phases, everyone’s assumed to be going simultaneously. I’ll let the players work cooperatively on not talking over each other, but if it really becomes an issue I’ll let them bid Story Points (which I’ll get to in a moment) to go first.

Story Points Give Players Narrative Control
Players start each adventure with a pool of Story Points — 12, in most cases. If you’ve got a nifty and unusual gadget (like, for instance, a TARDIS), your maximum Story Points are reduced. These automatically replenish between adventures, but within an adventure they get refreshed by meeting character goals and doing cool stuff. I know some people who will probably hate how Story Points work in Doctor Who, but it suits the setting. You can use them to improve rolls, each point spent bumping you up a degree of success. Pretty standard. You can use them fro dramatic editing, the number of points spent being relative to the degree of change or the size of the deus ex machina. The most expensive are 11 or more points. Yes, because characters start with 12 points, if they don’t spend them (or refresh them along the way with good roleplaying and such), the lowliest companion can go “all in”, spend all of their story points, and say “and then THIS happens”. There is potential for this to go horribly awry, of course, but I think it’s neat.

It’s not mentioned in the rules, but I think I’ll allow players to be competitive and cooperative with story points. Someone wants to spend points for something to happen, but you don’t like that? Outspend him. Or spend enough to neutralize him. Have a big plan, but not enough points? Other players who agree chip in to make it happen.

Character Advancement is Subjective
Once again, I know players who won’t like this, but I do because it suits the setting. There is no experience point system. An advancement, from increasing an Attribute to learning or improving a skill to gaining a good Trait or losing a bad one is entirely up to the gamemaster. Characters in Doctor Who tend to grow as people, not in terms of statistics. If you spend an adventure working on repairing a robot, the gamemaster might give you a point in that skill. If you’ve spent all your non-adventuring time working out to get buff, you might eventually get a point added to your Strength Attribute. It happens because the player roleplayed it, it was a big part of a story, and because the gamemaster felt it was appropriate.

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My major issue around roleplaying with miniatures is storage space. You need room for the minis themselves, you need room for the maps, and if you use terrain, well, forget about it. As a player I’ll still buy and paint minis for characters if it promises to be a long-running campaign. As a gamemaster, if I use miniatures at all I stick to printable paper minis.

Battlemats, frankly, have always been a pain. You can roll them up, sure, but then you have this floppy thing to try to store somewhere out of the way. Not a convenient size. I took to just putting a full-sized dry erase board on the table and using a ruler or tape measure to gauge distance rather than sweat drawing 1″ hexes. At least the dry erase board could be stashed under the bed or behind the sofa. It’s not exactly a portable solution, though, if you’re running a game at a friend’s house or a con.

Back in the 1990s, I somehow inherited a boxed set of Warhammer Fantasy dungeon tiles. Loved them to death. Arrange them as I wanted, make dungeons, awesome. The idea later caught on, and is pretty much standard 4e gear. The problem I have is, unless you really like buying a kajillion different sets of different sorts of locations and terrain, you’re either stuck with what you’ve got or you ignore what’s printed on the tiles. Dungeon tiles are pretty, to be sure, but they lack the generic flexibility of dry-erase mats.

So along comes Longtooth Studios with Battle Boards, aka Battle Graph Dry Erase Tiles. For around $25 you get four 11″ square dry-erase puzzle pieces, with 1″ squares already on them. They’re good, sturdy press board, and can be assembled any way you need them. They’re blank white, so draw on ‘em to your heart’s content and make your own maps. Buy more sets, snap ‘em together and make bigger maps. Easy to store on a shelf between game books. Easy to keep in your bag for travel (although a little heavy, but four tiles aren’t as heavy as your average hardcover game book so not a huge deal). The brilliance lies in the simplicity. Such a basic idea. Genius.

My big concern was cleaning them. Back in the day, we’d spend weeks delving into a single dungeon, so the marker lines would stay on the battle mats and leave stains. Faint, faded color that soaked in and would never, ever come off. Not a huge deal, I’m not THAT anal or OCD, but mildly annoying. To test the Battle Boards, I scrawled on them and left them sit in my hot apartment for a few days before trying to wipe the marks off with a paper towel. The marks came right off! Clean as a whistle. I have high confidence that standard dry-erase care (using dry erase cleaner or isopropyl alcohol) would work just fine if you had some residue. Good quality stuff, here. Recommended as a solution for gamemasters on the go, or with limited home storage for game accessories.

Full Disclosure: A rep from Longtooth emailed me a couple of weeks ago and asked it I would like to review this product. It’s up for an ENnie for Best Accessory, and they want to get the work out. They took the time to write me a nice email, and spared the expense to ship me a physical copy of the product via Priority Mail, so I bumped them to the top of my list. Of course, as per usual, if I thought the product sucked I wouldn’t review it at all, and if I had issues I’d tell you. Sending me a freebie didn’t influence my review at all, but my liking the product does make me want to get the word out and support their bid for an ENnie.

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Let’s talk about reviews. I write a lot of them. For some reason I’m considered an RPG boffin and people want to know my opinions. Because reviews have been a major source of agita for me lately, I want to talk about reviews in general and my process in particular.

Why I Write Reviews
We’ll start here. I do not write reviews just to get free stuff. I have more roleplaying games than I will ever have time to play. All of the games that I play on a regular basis, I have purchased. If I got a freebie, and I like it enough that I want to run it on a regular basis or play in a long-term campaign (as opposed to a one-shot or con game), I will buy it. That’s just me, and my personal code of ethics; I can’t presume to speak for all reviewers, but I know a bunch who do the same.

The reason I write reviews is because I want to support the hobby. Not the industry; the hobby. New games have the potential to bring in new players, and reinvigorate the interest of veteran players. I want to promote cool stuff and get people to play it. That’s why a lot of recent reviews have taken the form of personal anecdotes. Which leads right to me next point.

The Form of My Reviews
There’s an opinion out there that writing about games you haven’t played extensively, or at all, are completely without merit. If you share this opinion, please notify me so I can add you to the list of people whose products I will no longer write about. That opinion offends me, and here’s why: of all the game stuff out there, both unreviewed stuff I bought and freebies I’ve been sent for consideration, I chose to take the time to read yours. No, I didn’t have time to play it, but I made time to read it. Then I made time to write about it. And say good things about it, because I will no longer write negative reviews (we’ll get to that). Yet after kind words and free publicity, people still have the audacity to tell me I was wrong in the way I wrote the review of their product? Screw you with bells on.

People have also given me crap about what I’ve focused on in reviews of their product. I spent too much time on this (the thing I liked and found interesting) and not enough on that (the thing they want to be the selling point). Well, my review is my opinion. I write about the bits that get me excited and want to play the game. Sometimes that’s weird stuff. Sometimes it has nothing to do with your marketing. I still said nice things about your game. I’m not your paid marketer. I’m always happy to discover that publishers and writers didn’t like my review, because I know I won’t have to bother reviewing their future releases.

The ROLPUNK of Reviewing
It boils down to this: I review stuff that I find fun. If I find that writing the review is a chore, I table it. If I have to mull over what I want to say for too long, or have trouble finding the words, I ditch it. If I’m really excited about something, I want to write about it right away, and often. I love roleplaying games, I love roleplaying, and I want to talk about the cool stuff I discovered while reading your game, and the cool ideas that popped into my head while reading it. That’s my criteria: what in this product got my imagination going, what fiddly bits am I going to carry over into other games, what made me want to play this. I could give a crap about the rules; if I like the setting, I’ll port it to a rules system that works for me. Yeah, I like clever rules, but I’ve never wanted to play a game simply based on a clever dice mechanic. If the game offers good player or gamemaster advice, that gets me hot, too. That means it’s not only fun, it’s useful and worthy of a space on my self already cluttered with more systems, genres and settings than I’ll ever get use out of.

Take what works, leave the rest, and have fun. Your mileage may vary.

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There have been tons of “deity” books for fantasy roleplaying games over the years, but in my mind The Book of the Righteous remains the one to beat. Written for d20/3.5, it offers more than just “gods of X” who provide player characters with spells from certain spheres. It creates not only an integrated pantheon that can be dropped who into any fantasy game, it creates actual religions for each of the deities. Actual doctrine, structure, holy days, saints, prayers and practices and other details of organized religion are fleshed out in just the right amount of detail. There’s an overall mythology, including creation myths for all of the standard D&D races of the era. There’s a timeline of the deities activities in the world. And there’s a cosmology, explaining how all of the standard planes of existence fit in with the pantheon.

Best of all, it takes religion beyond clerics and paladins. Each god, regardless of alignment, has a new Holy Warrior class with abilities reflective of the deity and religion. There is a prestige class for each deity that allows devoted followers of any class to be rewarded for their faith. It makes religion accessible to anyone, which increases its role and importance in the game world.

Since the book was released, I’ve used it as my default pantheon for any fantasy game I’ve run. The deities are interesting and original, not just the Nth knockoff of the Greek or Norse pantheons. I’ve used it regardless of system. When Green Ronin ran an inventory clearance sale a while back, I bought a second copy to loan out to players, and have considered buying a third if I can get one cheap. There’s only one other game book that I own multiple copies of. That should tell you how impressed I am with The Book of the Righteous.

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This is a cool format: it’s sort of like a monster manual for the Solomon Kane setting, with stats and descriptions of both supernatural creatures and human villains. But each foe also has a one-sheet style adventure, many with maps and NPCs. If you’re running the Path of Kane Plot Point, these encounters fit right in. One foe was specifically designed to provide an optional Plot Point and subplot for the Path of Kane campaign.

There are 21 foes in this book, which doesn’t seem like a lot until you realize there are multiple characters or creatures per entry. These can be re-used for adventures of your own design, of course. It’s also at least 21 game sessions worth of adventures, which makes it a great value.

The production value is high, on par with the core Solomon Kane rulebook. It’s a full-color interior, with full-color art. The backgrounds on the maps are a sort of orange color, which print to a medium gray in black and white. This might be a consideration for those who print their PDFs.

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This “virtual boxed set” is made up of five PDFs, comprising five booklets you’d find in an old boxed set. It’s one large map (22″x34″) that can be printed as 8 U.S. letter-sized sheets and put together. It can be used as a stand-alone dungeon, or as part of a larger mega-dungeon.

The rooms are numbered, and each room gets its own page, basically an exploded view of the room taking up a little less than a quarter of the page, and blank lines on the rest of the page. This is intended to be the gamemaster’s reference, where you get to fill out what’s in the room. There are no encounters here; what you’re getting is just a map so that you can create your own encounters.

The final booklet has three tables to randomly generate sounds, smells, and “adventure-spawn features”, which are just descriptions of the room’s unusual features or some significant object within.

The PDFs have writable features, so you can type your own information in before you print and save yourself some hand cramps from writing. The maps can also be scales, and rooms printed individually, so you can lay them out like dungeon tiles and use them with miniatures.

If all you’re looking for is a blank map so you can design your own megadungeon, here you go. It’s pretty basic, but a solid idea.

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This game is about the secret history of the American Revolution, where the Founding Fathers (and Founding Mothers) donned clockwork power armor to battle the British and then, after independence had been won, with each other to determine the philosophical course this nation would take. It’s over the top, and more than a little silly.

This is a card game, with different suits defining things the characters are particularly good at. There are 17 pre-generated historical figures to choose from, as well as number of Tories to serve as enemies.

Each game begins at the secret Masonic Grand Lodge of the Americas, where the characters receive a coded message about British movements. This is a cleverly-disguised adventure generator; you draw 5 cards and discern their meanings on a series of tables. The players then have to sort out what this means, interpreting the rather vague results to create their own mission. There’s really no gamemaster in this game; those responsibilities are shares.

The character you play is also somewhat random. Each player is dealt a card, and starting with the high card each player declares who has volunteered for this mission and picks a character. You can elect to play the bad guys, and if no one does then the player with the low card has to play them.

On your turn, you play cards and narrate the action. Each suit, again, describes as type of action, so you have to narrate to fit the cards in play. Other players can play cards to attempt to add to or alter the narrative. When a scene is resolved, the next player lays down cards and narrates a scene, and so on until the mission is complete.

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This is Ken Hite rewriting Call of Cthulhu to match the sensibilities of modern Lovecraft scholarship, where not every character goes insane or dies, the protagonists survive and often win, and different types of stories can be told. It takes the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game as its template, overlays it with Robin Laws’ investigation-oriented GUMSHOE system, and then expands it to include oft-overlooked elements of Lovecraft’s stories along with other pulp elements and historical tropes from the 1920s. What you get is a very nice period piece that accomodates various styles of play and allows you to more accurately simulate the feel of classic Mythos stories.

The primary concieptt of the GUMSHOE system is that you’re going to find the clue. You don’t have to roll to try to find that piece of information needed to launch you into the next scene or the next encounter. You find it. The academic checks the library stacks, the doctor goes through medical records, the private investigator questions the witnesses, and they get the clues. It’s not about gathering data, it’s about figuring out what it all means.

Some of the game is resource management; you get a pool of points to spend, if and when you want. You find the clue, but by spending a point or two you can gain some benefit, like finding out shoggoths are sensitive to electricity before you actually encounter the shoggoth. Important stuff. Skill tests are done on a single d6, with difficulty ranging from 2 to 8; you can spent points ahead of time to add to that.

Trail of Cthulhu also breaks character madness down into two pieces: classic Sanity, which measures long-term mental deterioration, and Stability, which measures your ability to function in a reasonably normal way. When you see something scary and freak out, you’ve lost Stability. You’ll compose yourself eventually, with little or no long-term harm. On the other hand, you can be quite insane from exposure to the Mythos, with a low Sanity score, and still be quite functional and even pass for normal with a high Stability. This allows for not only more nuanced player characters, but far more frightening villains.

Overall a very nice update and expansion to Call of Cthulhu’s style of play, with far more possibilities given to those who don’t enjoy playing characters who will (not might) inevitably be destroyed during the game.

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If you like the planetary romance genre (Edgar Rice Burroughs, Flash Gordon, and so on) you’ll have a lot of fun with this. Welcome to Pulp Mars, where scantily-clad women (there is nudity here) cling to muscular men, intelligent White Apes plot and scheme, hideous chthulhoid Grey Men engage in weird science, and the Red Men, Green Men, Earth Men, and other assorted races do their thing.

The flavor text introduces things well, and the art is evocative of Frank Frazetta and Alex Raymond (although not of their caliber, but good). It’s broken into eight chapters. The first is about the planet and it’s history, a 33-page primer on the setting. The second is about characters, specifically creation, player character races, skills and edges. There’s a chapter on gear, one on setting-specific rules, a gamemastering section, and a bestiary full of nasty Martian critters to fight. Chapter sever is a five-part Plot Point campaign, which gamemasters can use and expand upon as in other Savage Worlds setting books. The last chapter has random encounters of various kinds, for player characters who wander around the planet running into things.

Really nice produce, captures the genre nicely, leverages the Savage Worlds setting format effectively.

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It’s a dark future. Earth is overcrowded. Crime is rampant. United Earth Corporation comes up with a solution: generically engineer some human-wolf hybrids who can track down and eliminate criminals and troubleshoot other corporate problems. These Genome Operatives, or “Hounds”, report to a handler known as a Genome Operative Director, or G.O.D.

So yeah, you play a cyberpunk werewolf with big fat juicy guns. Hounds of G.O.D.

Disclaimer: My name is in the credits of this game, as “Additional Support”. I’m not entirely sure what I did but Adam Weber, the game’s author, probably bounced ideas off of me on Twitter or something. I also consider Adam a personal friend. So I may be a bit biased, but if you read my review of his previous game, Helix: The Post Apocalypse, High-Tech, Fantasy, Western Role Playing Game, you know I won’t refrain from busting his chops.I should also mention that Robin Stacey, aka Greywulf, did the cover and some of the interior art for Hounds of G.O.D., the same person who did the cover art for DoubleZero.

The system is fairly straight forward die pool: roll a number of die equal to the appropriate attribute, roll under your appropriate skill. So to shoot, you’d roll a number of dice equal to Agility, and your target number would be your Guns skill. Character generation is a hybrid of point-build and random; you get 30 plus 3d10 points to spread between six attributes. You get 35 points to spread between 12 skills, which are fairly broad categories like the afore-mentioned “Guns” and things like Covert, Communications, and Medical. It works, and 12 skills cover everything the characters would have.

There’s some tight worldbuilding, and neat twists. A character can only stay in hybrid wolfman form for so long (rounds equal to Willpower). After that, you automatically change back to human. You can make Control rolls (a Willpower check) to stay in that form. If you fail, you can stay in the hybrid form but lose a Control point. This also means you go berserk and attack any perceived threat. Lose all your Control points and you experience Feral Lock, a genetic flaw meaning the character is stuck as a berserker wolfman. This is bad. They end up assigning Hounds, even your own teammates, to hunt you down.

While there are no specific rules for it, a “group build” is suggested. As the player characters are a team of operatives, players are encouraged to create characters that compliment each other. Think of a Mission: Impossible team: one sniper, one computer expert, on martial artist, etc. My only real criticism of the game is that there aren’t templates for various suggested character types.

I want to play this. It’s pretty beer-and-pretzels, but it’s got a lot of potential for one-shots and short campaigns. Werewolf operatives with big guns. Mission Impossible, but everyone on the team can turn into werewolves. Fun, fun, fun.

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